Thursday, October 23, 2008

I didn't blog Liz Lawley's talk, but she moved through a number of "tangibles" that librarians should be aware of, many of them in the form of new technologies, gadgets, and hands-on tech and craft projects. I grabbed an excerpt of her talk in video for you:

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

I am in one of the last sessions for this year's Internet Librarian conference. I took the opportunity to introduce you to the people I am sitting with waiting for the session by Steven Cohen. I also captured a little video from Steven's talk.

This is Steven Cohen on Google Reader. I haven't listened to it yet for sound quality, but his best line was at the very end. This is from his presentation What's Hot With RSS.

Google page rank improves the more social you are; critical for libraries

most of the people using social media, vast majority are anxious to interact with you and your organization online. There is a delicate balancing act, you need to take care to not interject yourself into someone's personal social space. People appreciate brands being in available online and authentic e.g. Zappos.

measure - this is the hard part! Traditional measurement (ROI) doesn't work very well.

Why measure?

Need to measure success to sell our ideas. What are your goals? What are we getting out of this activity?

What you are not measuring:

friendship

happiness

karma

enlightenment

girl power!

Need to measure a combination of both the quantitative and qualitative.

Behavior - quantitative:

number of blog posts - Boyd's Conversation Index - measures relative success of blog posts and comments + trackbacks - should be greater than 1 - otherwise you may be investing more than you are getting back for your library

will depend on your goals e.g. if you add photos to Flickr to increase traffic to your native digital photo collection, don't just look at stats on Flickr but also look to see what kind of traffic was referred from Flickr to your site.

Experience - listening to what people are experience. - "the experience metric" - stars, scars or neutral?

Activities

monitoring search engine results - focus on Google - Google is search engine used by everyone BUT ALSO they take into account social media results - the only one where they show up with great regularity.

technorati - which blogs are linking to your blogs; are they in your target audience? - for blogs and feeds - authority score & qualitative

delicious - is your content bookmark-worthy? How many people have bookmarked it? Comments posted?

check conversations on twitter - Seattle Public Library has great results on Twitter

I am teaching my Social Networking Tools survey course in Ottawa again. The school tells me that the November 17th class is now full, but there are spots remaining in the Tuesday, November 18th class. Please don't wait to sign up!

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Connie's note: These are notes from Stephen's talk. Any errors or omissions are mine.

You need to be ahead of the curve.

The opportunity finally exists to use social software inside the organization. We can finally use some of this social software to lift ourselves up.

We can't wait for everyone to change at once. You've got to keep up. Anyone who doesn't use the Internet is looking to be unemployed; if you don't have a Facebook account you are looking to be irrelevant. However, it takes a while for things to filter through and people to adapt.

We see a fundamental shift in how questions are asked and answered. People will ask questions on Facebook and MySpace. Open Social, G3 phone coming out today - if everybody's stuff is on their phone e.g. geotagging - customize a search and customize search engine rankings. You can change the search engine rankings of your organizations based on geographic location e.g. Obama campaign money spent on localized search engine rankings - political searches show up different results in different neighbourhoods. Does democracy start to become at risk?

What is not advertising-based search engine ranking? Us!

Some of us are coming to the realization that we are not creating information just for us - we are doing the work for others who work differently than us.

Enterprises exist because people need to work together. Need to work to coming to the same conclusions when you are working together.

Circles of trust inside organizations - we see this exactly replicated in social software such as Facebook - you have your inner circle of friends who you trust.

He is having to re-discover people from his past; his children will never lose their friends because of the new tools.

What does social networking look like inside the organization? Librarians retiring after 40 years of work, doing excellent local research. The first thing we do when they retire is wipe their computers clean, as if all their bookmarks and tools they have developed are not still useful.

Why do we exist in enterprise? To have conversations. That is what social networking tools are now all about. What is happening with these tools that is similar to inside the organization?

The power of formal versus informal language

The sharing economy - sharing the insights is most valuable - how do we add people's notes - context is what helps you understand where the friction is - inside a company you can codify the context, which you might not want to do outside the organization e.g. are there different strategies you use to appeal to a female-dominated market compared to a male-dominated market?

Using wikis is no longer an innovation; however, depends on organization - may look like an innovation if you haven't done it yet. You have to leave the laggards behind. When we go into our organizations, you don't have to have everyone on instant messaging for example.

The new Web 2.0 era distribution models remain largely untapped. How can we change the corporate culture to collaborate more. Take something like mapping the human genome - they sat it in social space and communicated with each other - was supposed to take 50 years, was done in just a few.

We are seeing a fundamental shift in having to adapt to how our clients learn - lawyers learn differently than surgeons do. You don't want your surgeon arriving for surgery saying "it's okay, I read the article last night." Surgeons learn as auto mechanics do.

Most librarians not good with visual interfaces. Show us a satellite system and we are not as comfortable as with text.

Does your intranet move up to the space so that you can share objects/documents, collaborate, put into groups. How does it relate to others? What actions can you take?

How can you be where your users are, and then move to the next space.

If you are a news librarian and not in LinkedIn, you are looking to be irrelevant. He gets a lot of interviews from being on LinkedIn.

Get good at the cloud - cloud applications - core applications online - Zoho, zotero, Google Docs - they give it to you for free and be willing to take your ads. They already know what you think and they will will serve up ads and search results based on your behaviour. As a Word-based profession, we need to get better at Internet and intranet behaviours.

The kindle is not about being an ebook reader, it is about being a device. The iPhone is not about being a phone. The U.S. is 5-7 years behind the rest of the world. The U.S. is going to hit it very hard and very fast.

Changing to a mainly mobile focus - how are we going to adapt? Thinking at Yale - what is library going to look like in a mobile environment - Joe Murphy, Yale Science Libraries.

Second Life is not going to survive - it will be something else - but we go in to figure out how we are going to relate to each other - their real life behaviours are moving into Second Life.

Private Enterprise social networking - search for "White label social networking" on his blog.

How do you make yourself discoverable? How do you make others in your organization discoverable? How do you tell people what you are good at?

Browser plug-ins - have you built a plug-in so you can show people how? Change the browser at the top so that it can become the standard. Why won't we have our search engines search those services that we actually subscribe to, rather than everything? Right now we have "meat hacker" search engines. You can build search toolbars to search the best stuff.

I missed most of today's sessions, but I did make sure to attend the keynote this morning by Howard Rheingold, Berkeley & Stanford professor and the world's leading thinker/professor/teacher regarding online communities. I took notes and attempted a few photos--will try to get those up here shortly. I did take down one quote from him during the keynote which I included in one of my slides in my presentation.

No time to learn how to podcast or make videos? Seesmic, Utterli, ooVoo, BlogTV, Qik, and Talkshoe are just a few of the new audio and video tools letting people create their own instant web content with a small learning curve. Some are meant for short, quick thoughts by individuals on the go, others for longer conversations among a group connected to the web. Compare these exciting new tools and discuss their roles in community building and collaboration.

How do you introduce 2.0 technologies into the law firm library? Law firms are notoriously slow in adopting new technologies and are often steeped in the traditional. In the first presentation, learn how creative law librarians spearheaded a project to create a firm intranet in a culture that doesn’t embrace technology or sharing easily. Working with several other departments the speakers bridged the gap between many different user groups with competing ideas and helped lead the change through collaboration as they introduced the law firm to new technologies. They share how they used focus groups, marketing, and involved key users to “sell” the intranet, first to management, then to staff; what tools were used to create buy-in; and the strategies that were involved, as well as experiences with an internal wiki as a project management tool for the intranet and a way to introduce library staff to 2.0 technologies in a user-friendly format that spawned other uses, including collaboration, policy development, resource sharing, training, and more. Drawing from her experience as a law firm library director, Crosby provides additional examples and describes where law libraries are headed next.

Ottawa, OntarioNovember 17 or 18, 2008 - 2 full-day classes availableSocial Networking Tools - Hands on LearningProfessional Learning Centre, Faculty of Information, University of TorontoConnie Crosby, Instructor-->the Monday, November 17th class is either full or almost full. We have added a second date

Friday, October 17, 2008

This year's Internet Librarian International looks, as usual, excellent. I found this perhaps a little late--a widget with rolling photos and tweets (via Twitter) from conference participants to make me feel a little more like I am there:

Thanks also to Åke Nygren for sharing his presentation on the build-it-yourself social network site Ning, itself built on a Ning site: http://2008ningthings.ning.com/forum. (Use the menu at the top of the page to explore the rest of the site.).

About Me

I am the principal consultant at Crosby Group Consulting specializing in knowledge management, information management and social media primarily for the legal and information industries. I teach continuing education courses on social media at the iSchool Institute, University of Toronto. I also write, blog and speak. My 2010 book Effective Blogging for Libraries is part of the award-winning Tech Set series from Neal-Schuman Publishing.

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